Shoe manufacture is a labor-intensive business. Shoe uppers must be cut. Joining edges and uppers must be thinned, commonly called “skiving” and “splitting.” Upper pieces must be affixed with interlines. Eyelets need to be formed. Uppers must be stitched, sewn, or otherwise affixed to strobels so as to fit over particular lasts, which include specific toe shape, heel height, or other dimension. As shoe technologies continue to evolve, particularly athletic shoe designs, the number of shoe pieces being added has increased, requiring increasingly complicated manufacturing steps to produce shoes. Such manufacturing steps are still largely carried out by hand.
Automating shoe manufacturing is no trivial task. While humans can easily assemble shoes on a last and sew uppers and strobels together, such tasks are cumbersome to machines that cannot move freely. Along the same lines, checking shoe parts for errors can be easily done by workers trained to look for specific problems but is difficult for machines.